A Forest Unfolding at USC

A Forest Unfolding

featuring Richard Powers

Music by Garner, Goldstein, Jaffe, Moe, & Wagner

Performed by Thomas Meglioranza, Laura Gilbert, members of the Ciompi Quartet, and USC faculty

Presented by The Southern Exposure New Music Series

Friday, April 14, 2023 @ 7:30pm

Recital Hall | School of Music | University of South Carolina

livestream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIsOZL3-eQ0

Program

Birding by Ear: Six Songs on Texts by Richard Powers (2019) by Perry Goldstein (b. 1952)

Thomas Meglioranza, baritone; Ari Streisfeld, violin; Claire Bryant, cello; Charles Fugo, piano

I. White-throated sparrow

III. Lyre Bird

V. Barred Owl

Butte (2022) by David Kirkland Garner (b. 1982)

Laura Gilbert, flute; Ari Streisfeld & Eric Pritchard, violins; Jonathan Bagg, viola; Caroline Stinson, cello; Nicholas Susi, piano

--brief intermission--

A Forest Unfolding (2018)

Rachel Calloway, mezzo-soprano; Thomas Meglioranza, baritone; Laura Gilbert, flute; Joseph Eller, clarinets; Eric Pritchard, violin; Jonathan Bagg, viola; Caroline Stinson, cello; Nicholas Susi, piano

I. No Voices and no shade

1. Native Trees by Eric Moe (b. 1954), text by W.S. Merwin

2. From The Book of Job by David Kirkland Garner, text from the Book of Job

II. They have stood round my sleep

3. Eternal Rhythm by Stephen Jaffe (b.1954)

4. Woodswoman Etude by David Kirkland Garner, text by Anne LaBastille

5. Trees by Stephen Jaffe, text by W.S. Merwin

III. A dreamer, dreaming

6. From Thoreau’s Notebooks by David Kirkland Garner, text by Henry David Thoreau

7. In a Country Once Forested by Melinda Wagner (b. 1957), text by Wendell Berry

IV. Everything in the forest

8. Variation-Deciso by Stephen Jaffe

9. Eternal Song by David Kirkland Garner, text by Richard Powers

Notes

Birding by Ear: Six Songs on Texts by Richard Powers (2019)

This is my fourth collaboration with novelist, poet, and friend Richard Powers, whom I met at the University of Illinois when I was a graduate student and he a freshman almost 50 years ago. Even then, one might have had an inkling that he would become a major voice in American literature. Author of thirteen novels, including the 2006 National Book Award-winner The Echo Maker, and more recently winner of the Pulitzer Prize for one of the most profoundly moving books about contemporary ecological pressures, Overstory, Rick has tackled the most challenging themes of 20th- and 21st-century life.

On their surface, his six texts—titled “White-throated Sparrow,” “Mockingbird,” “Lyre Bird,” “Famous Bird Sayings,” “Barred Owl,” and “The Morning Chorus”—seem innocent enough. But they are only partly about birds, and in greater part about what humans impose on them as, in our loneliness and need to connect with their world and our own, we hear their calls as sensible communications. “Who cooks for you?” asks the barred owl in song 5; “pleased to meetcha” calls the Olive-sided flycatcher in song 2; or at least those are the words we pretend to have them mean. Worse, we destroy their habitat and they sing “in thanks,” the lyre bird in song 3 perfectly imitating the chain saw that is destroying the woods and therefore their homes. Rick’s concern for the way humans have become alienated from the natural world finds subtle expression in these poems.

As with all of our other collaborations, Rick supplied a cornucopia of rich images to spark musical imagination. It was easy to resist a literal representation of any of the almost 20 birds: vireos and sparrows, hermit thrushes and orioles…. Birds, with the great timbral variety, subtle microtonal inflections, and rhythmic “invention” of their trilling, singing, and calling, are impossible to emulate. There are places in the songs, however, when I (imperfectly) copy the contours of their calls (especially in “Mockingbird”). But my larger aim was to represent the totality of the multivalent images with as much charm, humor, drama, sadness, tenderness, and affection as I could muster.

Tonight’s program presents three of the six songs, numbers 1, 3, and 5. While the texts of songs 2, 4, and 6 contain references to many birds, 1, 3, and 5 are portraits of individual birds. “White-throated Sparrow” is the subject of the first song. The call of the white-throated sparrow—a descending minor (or sometimes major) third—is simple enough to emulate with the fragile piping of a “distant” solo violin. That motive is picked up by the baritone, singing a favorite setting of the call, “Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody,” imitated by the violin or violin and cello. The text asserts that consonance is dead (though don’t tell that to the sparrow, whose call precedes and likely will succeed human life), and the music toggles between dissonance and consonance, tonality and atonality, as will the entire cycle.

The “Lyrebird” makes an appearance in song number 3. I am indebted to Rick for sharing with me David Attenborough’s video of this extraordinary Australian bird, which is able to imitate not only the sounds of other birds but of man-made objects as well, most remarkably a chain saw. (Listen through to the end and prepare to be amazed.)

I took advantage of references in the poetry to “ancient times” (for example, in the white-throated sparrow’s “probing for major and minor thirds/Daily for the last ten million years”) and the references to tonality to reach back to the music of Thomas Tallis, a favorite of Rick’s, which is threaded into the song. It seemed appropriate to use Tallis’s anthem, “Forgive me, Lord, My Sin,” given the subject matter: the bird imitates the sound of the “instrument” that is destroying its habitat. There is no attempt to imitate the bird, except at the end, where piano, cello, and violin in their lowest registers make an attempt to approximate a chainsaw.

“Barred Owl” is the subject of the fifth song. It is one of the two shortest poems, 9 lines, but as long as the setting of the 31 lines of the last song, “A Morning Chorus.” The slow tempo and somewhat ponderous deliberateness of the music was suggested by videos of the great bird in flight. The music builds up to lift-off on the line “through the dark we hunt alone” and sweeping rising and falling gestures represent the slow flapping of those great wings. The bird’s call, imagined as “who cooks for you,” is a recurring motto in the song, appearing over two dozen times, stated by every instrument in all parts of the musical texture.

The work is dedicated, with greatest affection, to two dear friends and great artists: the text’s poet, Richard Powers, and Emerson String Quartet violinist Philip Setzer, who gently encouraged the composition of this piece several years ago. Birding By Ear was premiered at the Great Lakes Music Festival in the summer of 2022 by baritone Randall Scarlata, Emerson String Quartet violinist Philip Setzer and cellist Paul Watkins, and pianist Giles Vonsattel. I am grateful to the performers who are presenting this challenging music tonight, baritone Thomas Meglioranza, violinist Ari Streisfeld, cellist Claire Bryant, and pianist Nicolas Susi.

-Perry Goldstein

________________

Butte (2022)

I have spent most of my life living east of the Mississippi. The West, and especially the deserts of the West and Southwest are, for me, a completely foreign, magical, and mysterious landscape. One of my favorite places, and one of the most different than my home region in North Georgia, is the area around Moab, UT. Having spent most of my life amongst dense tree cover, the alien landscape with expansive views, red rock formations, sandstone arches, canyons, and a dearth of trees captivates me. Buttes, many of which are regarded as sacred landforms in Native American cultures, are "tall, flat-topped, steep-sided towers of rock... created through the process of erosion, the gradual wearing away of earth by water, wind, and ice... Caprock protects the softer rock surrounding it... Buttes slowly become slender spires... Eventually, even the caprock falls prey to severe weathering and erosion." Buttes are landforms on an incredibly long trajectory of erosion and, eventually, collapse.

This piece was written as a response to novelist Richard Powers' incredible and heartbreaking Bewilderment (2021). While earlier drafts of this piece explored more direct connections to the novel's characters, structure, plot, and themes, I eventually landed on this musical meditation on buttes. For me, both Powers' novel and the buttes of the Southwest spark similar emotions around the tragic beauty of impermanence. This piece is in eight parts and, for me, each is a kind of portrait of a Butte, showing the shape of the stone monument in sound (the notes moving up then back down) with each of the eight parts from a different vantage point: distant at first, getting closer and closer until the enormity of the land form is overwhelming, before receding again into the distance.

-David Kirkland Garner

______________________

A Forest Unfolding (2018)

A Forest Unfolding is a collaborative work inspired by recent scientific research into the rich communication and subterranean connectivity between trees. Four writers—the environmentalists Bill McKibben and Joan Maloof, along with the novelists Richard Powers and Kim Stanley Robinson—selected prose passages and poems on the relations among people and trees. They presented these selections to four composers who set these words into a linked sequence of recitatives and arias. The resulting whole traces a narrative arc from human estrangement from nature to a glimpse of the endless cooperation that knits a forest together.

The composers themselves communicated and cooperated with one another throughout the process, sharing thoughts on the relations between the texts, exchanging material and musical ideas, and shaping the structure of the larger piece. Together, they settled on a shared musical intertext, the final section of the last song in Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde, to lend connective tissue to the whole. In this way, a collective process of many makers yielded a work in the cantata tradition about the need for human reintegration with the rest of the deeply collaborative living world.

A Forest Unfolding was conceived by Richard Powers, Laura Gilbert, and Jonathan Bagg. It was commissioned by Electric Earth Concerts for premieres on August 12, 2018 in Peterborough, New Hampshire and August 18th at the Portland Chamber Music Festival in Maine.

-Richard Powers

Texts

Birding By Ear (Richard Powers)

I. White-throated Sparrow

This is the guy who invented tonality:

Old Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.

Hung up on triads and banal modality!

O sweet Peabody Kimberley Canada.

Haven't you heard that consonance is dead?

Old Sam Peabody Somebody Nobody

Has been probing for major and minor thirds

Daily for the last ten million years

As if sound's mysteries still had a key.

Poor Sam Peabody, Peabody, Peabody.

III. Lyre Bird

You might be forgiven

For thinking that

The forest will outlast

All new sounds

Until you've heard

A lyre bird

Perfectly imitate

A chain saw.

V. Barred Owl

In the night, when all is done:

Who cooks for you-all?

Who cooks for you?

Through the black, we hunt alone.

Who cooks for you-all?

Who cooks for you?

When all songs but one are sung:

Who cooks for you?

______________________

A Forest Unfolding

Native Trees — W. S. Merwin

Neither my father nor my mother knew the names of the trees
where I was born
what is that

I asked and my
father and mother did not
hear they did not look where I pointed surfaces of furniture held
the attention of their fingers
and across the room they could watch walls they had forgotten
where there were no questions
no voices and no shade

Were there trees
where they were children
where I had not been
I asked
were there trees in those places
where my father and my mother were born

and in that time did
my father and my mother see them
and when they said yes it meant
they did not remember
What were they I asked what were they

but both my father and my mother
said they never knew

From The Book of Job — translated by Stephen Mitchell

Who is this whose ignorant words

smear my design with darkness?
Stand up now like a man;
I will question you: please, instruct me.

Where were you when I planned the earth?

Tell me, if you are so wise.
Do you know who took its dimensions,

measuring its length with a cord?

What were its pillars built on?
Who laid down its cornerstone,
while the morning stars burst out singing

and the angels shouted for joy!

Have you ever commanded morning

or guided dawn to its place—
to hold the corners of the sky
and shake off the last few stars?

All things are touched with color;

the whole world is changed.

Have you seen where the snow is stored

or visited the storehouse of hail,
which I keep for the day of terror,
the final hours of the world?

Where is the west wind released
and the east wind sent down to earth?

Who cuts a path for the thunderstorm

and carves a road for the rain—
to water the desolate wasteland,
the land where no man lives;

to make the wilderness blossom

and cover the desert with grass?

From Woodswoman — Anne LaBastille

Sometimes at night when a problem has me turning and

twisting in the silent sleeping loft, I get up, wake the dog,
and glide onto the lake in my guideboat. Slipping over the star-

strewn surface of Black Bear Lake, I’m gradually imbued
with the ordered goodness of our earth.... This seeps
into my soul as surely as sphagnum moss absorbs water....

True, some trees get blown over by storms; some stars

burn out; some people encounter crippling misfortunes

of health or finances. But the forest remains; the skies

keep twinkling; and human beings keep striving. Drifting

about under the night heavens, I think and hope that I

can weather the storms which will blow my way.

And that these trials will give me depth and stature
so that in old age I can be like my big white pines—

dignified, lending beauty to the surroundings, and lifting

their heads with strength and serenity to both
sun and storms, snowflakes and swallows.

Trees — W.S. Merwin

I am looking at trees
they may be one of the things I will miss

most from the earth
though many of the ones I have seen

already I cannot remember
and though I seldom embrace the ones I see

and have never been able to speak
with one
I listen to them tenderly
their names have never touched them
they have stood round my sleep
and when it was forbidden to climb them

they have carried me in their branches

From Thoreau's Notebooks — Henry David Thoreau

My heart leaps into my mouth at the sound of the wind in the woods....
Slate-colored snowbirds flit before me in the path, feeding on the seeds on the snow.
I love and could embrace the shrub oak rising above the snow, lowly whispering to me,

akin to winter thoughts, and sunsets, and to all virtue.
Covert which the hare and the partridge seek, and I too seek.

What cousin of mine is the shrub oak? How can any man suffer long?
For a sense of want is a prayer, and all prayers are answered.
Rigid as iron, clean as the atmosphere, hardy as virtue,

innocent and sweet as a maiden is the shrub oak. In proportion as

I know and love it, I am natural and sound as a partridge.
I felt a positive yearning toward one bush this afternoon.
There was a match found for me at last. I fell in love with a shrub oak.

In a Country Once Forested — Wendell Berry

The young woodland remembers

the old, a dreamer dreaming

of an old holy book,
an old set of instructions,

and the soil under the grass

is dreaming of a young forest,

and under the pavement the soil

is dreaming of grass.

From The Overstory — Richard Powers

Networked together underground by

countless thousand miles of living threads,

her trees feed and heal each other, keep

their young and sick alive, pool their

resources and metabolites. . . .

Her trees are far more social than anyone

suspects. There are no individuals. There

aren’t even separate species. Everything in

the forest is the forest. Trees fight no more

than do the leaves on a single tree.

Nature isn’t red in tooth and claw. If trees

share their storehouses, then every drop of

red must float on a sea of green.

Richard Powers

Richard Powers’s characters themselves shift between the impulse to connect and its inevitable crash and burn; between the Emersonian urge to embrace the difficult ad-lib of the world and the Dickinsonesque need to recoil from its evident bruising into the supple sanctuary of the aesthetic enterprise, to withdraw into the secured refuge of a novel, a piece of music, a movie house, a museum, even cyberspace. Although long reluctant to encourage the distraction of biography, Powers has lived–like his characters–sustained within a curiously similar geography; never quite at home, never quite comfortable with belonging, shifting between engagement and escape. Powers was born 18 June 1957 in Evanston, Illinois, the fourth of five children, two older sisters and a brother and one younger brother. Early on, in the mid-1960s, his father, a high school principal with a working-class background, moved the family to the north Chicago suburb of Lincolnwood, an older neighborhood, Powers recalls, that was heavily Jewish. “My sisters and brothers and I would be just about the only kids in school for the high holy days.”

He continues, “I always had a sense that we weren’t quite native, a self-image compounded when we moved to Bangkok right before my eleventh birthday.” Powers then spent what he has frequently described as five “eye-opening” years in Thailand when his father accepted an appointment with the International School of Bangkok during the height of the American military presence in Southeast Asia. Amid such dramatic relocations, the young Powers discovered the aesthetic sanctuary: he tapped into both a sustaining love of music (an accomplished student of vocal music, he trained in the cello but also plays guitar, clarinet, and saxophone) and a restless curiosity fed by voracious reading. He recounts the impact of both the Iliad and the Odyssey (testimony again to a position between, on the one hand, the realist’s impulse to record the world with the historian’s eye and, on the other, the poet’s privilege to invent with the license of the unleashed imagination). His earliest reading passion, however, was for nonfiction, specifically biographies and science (he has cited particularly the impact of Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle—which he read, amazingly enough, in fourth grade). He recalls, in part because of the panicked surge of interest in science following the Sputnik launch, the notion that he was somehow “destined to be a scientist.” Thus, as a teenager, he explored careers in paleontology, oceanography, and archaeology before ultimately choosing physics.

In his formal studies, however, Powers would soon find himself pulled between science and the arts. In 1975, he enrolled as a physics major at the University of Illinois. Following a pivotal course, an honors seminar taught by Robert Schneider, a charismatic teacher and an accomplished Freudian critic who Powers recalls convinced him that literature was the “perfect place for someone who wanted the aerial view,” he changed to English/rhetoric when he realized, with some frustration, that the sciences demanded, even encouraged, an intolerable specialization. In his literary studies Powers was drawn to the intricate narrative structurings of the first-generation European modernists (particularly the work of Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, and James Joyce) and to the emotional dramas of Thomas Hardy—again Powers locating himself in between, drawn to both highly experimental modernism with its conception of the novel as a self-justifying architectural form and the compelling tradition of narrative realism that trained the open eye on the world itself. Powers completed his M.A. in late 1979. But the humanities could not provide Powers a secure space. He elected not to pursue doctoral studies as he feared finding in literary theory and criticism the same limiting need to specialize.

Powers moved to Boston in January 1980 and worked as a computer programmer and freelance data processor, skills he had developed ruing his off-hours learning the massive computer network systems at Illinois. Computer programmer by day, he continued his eclectic reading program, ingesting volumes of history, sociology, political science, aesthetics, and hard science theory, as well as a wide range of novels and poetry—”random pleasures, all over the map.” He lived near the Museum of Fine Arts, where he would spend Saturdays (admission was free before noon), and where, one week, he chanced upon an exhibit that included August Sander’s 1914 black-and-white photograph of three Westerwald farm boys heading, according to the title, to a dance. The image haunted Powers. “All of my previous year’s random reading just consolidated and converged on this one moment, this image, which seemed to me to [be] the birth photograph of the twentieth century.”

Within forty-eight hours he quit his job to devote himself to producing his first novel, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance, a project that took more than two years. “I thought: I’m going to put everything that I know in this book, because I’m never going to get another shot at this…Afterwards, I figured, I’d have to go back and do jobs that people are willing to pay for.” That novel, which explores the tectonic impact of artistic images, met with significant critical success, much to Powers’s surprise. Encouraged by the realization that he could make a living from writing, Powers moved to southern Holland—in part to withdraw from the distractions of his initial success in the United States but more to immerse himself in that region’s fascinating play of multiple languages and dialects and to secure the distance necessary to finish the draft of his second novel, Prisoner’s Dilemma, an unsettling work that audaciously juxtaposed Disney and the logic of nuclear warfare, a novel that Powers has described as his most American work.

While still in the Netherlands Powers completed his landmark work, The Gold Bug Variations, a dense and luminous story of love and death that intricately braids the metaphors of genetics, computer science, and polyphonic music. Two years after Gold Bug Powers published the much darker Operation Wandering Soul, which chronicled the slow-motion meltdown of a young resident-doctor confronting the harrowing realities of a pediatrics ward in a Los Angeles public hospital. Work on that manuscript was done during a yearlong stay in Cambridge and then completed when Powers returned stateside in 1992 to accept a position as writer-in-residence at the University of Illinois. Powers would use this academic experience to fashion Galatea 2.2, an ingenious retelling of the Pygmalion story using a bizarre university computer experiment in which an eccentric neurologist, assisted by a young, successful writer named Richard Powers, attempts to teach a computer network to respond to literature.

This alternating pattern of darkness and affirmation, doubt and celebration–the shifting from Emerson to Dickinson–marks his most recent work as well. In 1998 Powers published Gain, a disturbing narrative of an Illinois woman coming to terms at midlife with ovarian cancer most likely caused from the environmental carelessness of a nearby chemical plant, who two-hundred-year history Powers relates in alternating chapters. But in his follow-up work, the mesmerizing Plowing the Dark (2000), Powers chronicles both the grand efforts of a Seattle-based computer research team to produce the first self-contained virtual reality environment and the poignant narrative of an American teacher held hostage for four brutal years by Islamic fundamentalists in Beirut, a prisoner left to the devices of his imagination, the first virtual reality machine.

Named in 1996 to Illinois’s endowed Swanlund Chair in English and appointed to the Center for Advanced Study (1999), Powers continues to write, teach, and travel. He has recently completed his eighth novel, a sprawling generational study titled The Time of Our Singing (January 2003), with the properly ambitious themes of racial identity, the iterations of history, and the power of music. […]

Composers and Performers

Composers:

Perry Goldstein

David Kirkland Garner

Eric Moe

Stephen Jaffe

Melinda Wagner

Performers:

Richard Powers, narrator

Rachel Calloway, mezzo-soprano

Thomas Meglioranza, baritone

Laura Gilbert, flute

Joseph Eller, clarinets

Ari Streisfeld, violin

Eric Pritchard, violin

Jonathan Bagg, viola

Caroline Stinson, cello

Claire Bryant, cello

Nicholas Susi, piano

Charles Fugo, piano

Featured poet and visual artist

Poet, essayist, and teacher Nicola Waldron was born in the chalklands of southern England among buttercups and red admiral butterflies, garden snails, ladybirds, and the (hated!) stag beetle. She wandered the hedgerows looking for blackberries in September, watched blackbirds, robins, sparrows, and blue-tits arrive and disappear in the sycamores, oaks, and orchard trees of her neighborhood, waiting all year for the horse chestnut trees to drop their gatherable, shiny, play-with-me ‘conkers.’ Most of all, she carried the names of flora and fauna in her head or in her pocket, in her beloved Observer guides, learning the language of nature that would become her first understanding of poetry. These practices also offered Nicola her first intimation of language’s power to help us delight in the present moment and then hold in our memory things that give our lives pleasure and meaning, beauty and truth. One of her favorite books, alongside her Palgrave’s The Golden Treasury of English Verse, was the ubiquitous The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady that included reproductions of Edith Holden‘s sketches of British wildlife, labeled with a naturalist’s attentive eye and lyric vocabulary.

Nicola first visited the United States in 1986, where she met writer and environmentalist James Barilla, who introduced her to brook trout and rainbow trout, fireflies, and salmon flies, among many other species. Together, they walked the lodgepole-lined tracks of New England’s forests and climbed the bear-grass covered hills of Western Montana, eventually settling in Northern California with its golden poppies, and, briefly, the prairies of lakeside Illinois, before arriving in Columbia, South Carolina in 2007. Here, their yard acts as a designated wildlife habitat, and they enjoy exploring the rich variety of plants and animals that enrich their local area, as well as trips to the mountains and the coast. Nicola favors especially the anole, the yellow jessamine, the dogwood, and lettered olive seashells; Jim loves everything but the squirrels that pilfer his peaches every year!

Nicola and James have two children, Brook, named for the world’s clear-running streams, and Beatrice, ‘bringer of gladness.’ Nicola and Jim teach writing and literature for the English Department at the University of South Carolina. Nicola is also a yoga instructor, guided in all her teaching by the wisdom and beauty of the natural world.

The poems in this exhibition were mostly inspired by observations made during the ‘lockdown’ and early months of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020-2021, but there are also earlier and later works on display here. Nicola’s chapbook of poetry Girl at the Watershed was a winner of the South Carolina Poetry Initiative’s chapbook contest, chosen and edited by Kwame Dawes. She is currently working on several creative projects, including a longer collection of poetry, an essay collection, and a memoir about leaving London and coming to America. Nicola can be reached at waldronn@mailbox.sc.edu.

_________________________________________________________

Janet Kozachek hails from Princeton Junction, New Jersey, where her rural formative years were spent drawing and writing in nature. Her subsequent education was unusually eclectic, having traveled, worked and studied in Europe, China and the United States. She obtained her Master of Fine Arts Degree in Drawing and Painting from Parsons School of Design in New York, where she also studied poetry with J.D. McClatchy. Her Certificate of Graduate Study in Chinese Art from the Central Academy of Fine Art (CAFA) in the People’s Republic of China included the study of Chinese poetry and painting. Her undergraduate study at Rutgers was in science (biology) and art.

In addition to her painting, Janet Kozachek is a well-known mosaic artist, and was the Founding President of the Society of American Mosaic Artists. Her work is in a number of museums and private collections, and she was the recipient of the award for excellence in drawing from Art Fields (2019), a Puffin Foundation Award, National Endowment for the Arts awards, a Heritage Foundation Award, and a Humanities Council Award. Her writing and illustrations have been published in Undefined magazine, Ekphrasis, Local Life, Pink, Hybrid Harpy Review, The Colorado Review, and the upcoming Porlock Review. Ms. Kozachek is the author of The Book of Marvelous Cats, My Women, My Monsters, A Rendering of Soliloquies – Figures Painted in Spots of Time, and A Book of Bothersome Cats. Janet Kozachek was the recipient of the 2020 Common Ground on the Hill Award for Excellence in the Traditional Arts.

When not writing, drawing, or painting in her studio in Orangeburg, South Carolina, Janet Kozachek finds joy in cooking, gardening, and making ceramic musical instruments. Her work can be found in the Artisans Center in Walterboro, South Carolina.

www.janetkozachek.net

kozachekart.blogspot.com kozachek@bellsouth.net

Thank you!

Special Thanks to:

Nicola Waldron

Janet Kozachek

Mya Hubbard

Olga Yukhno

Elise Blackwell, director of The Open Book

Brad Stratton and Christy Friend

Beth Richardson

Miranda Morrison

Composers Stephen Jaffe and Melinda Wagner

Rachel Calloway, Joe Eller, Nick Susi, Ari Streisfeld, Claire Bryant, and Charles Fugo

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